... but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man. My mother and I have discussed her affair. She was a young woman in a bad relationship and I have no judgment. This has been my lived reality for nearly 30 of my 35 years on earth. I am not ashamed of it, or of who I am—never that—but I was advised by my pastor nearly 20 years ago that this was not a mess of my doing and it was not my responsibility to fix it. All of my siblings and I have different parents. I'm actually not even sure how many siblings I have. It is horrifying to me that my most personal information, for the most nefarious reasons, has been forced out into the open and that my private past and pain have been used as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America. I resent that lies have been reported as truth and that the obviously racist intentions of these attacks have been consistently downplayed at my expense and that of my family....ADDED: What does King really know? Assuming he's being scrupulously honest here — and he has a very strong motive to lie — he is relaying what is only hearsay. His mother could have lied to him. If his current story is true, then she lied to the authorities and caused a lie to appear on the birth certificate. She had a motive to tell that lie, we might observe, and less of a motive to lie when she — assuming he's telling the truth — told him about that "a light-skinned black man."
King's current writing conveys great outrage — "horrifying," "nefarious,""obviously racist" — but that outrage is not inconsistent with lying. He's trying to push back those who would discredit him, and perhaps we should take a big step much further back and wonder why a man should ever need or care about whether or not he had a "light-skinned black" father? But King has made progress in the world through his self-presentation as a black man, though that light-skinned black father was only a story — true or false — told by his mother.
The Black Lives Matter movement calls us to become more race conscious as we perceive and think about great social and political issues. It is possible to go that direction without getting into the details about the authenticity of particular individuals. I mean it is possible for particular individuals to stick to the general patterns and issues. You're not going to get everyone to do that. So we end up with the strategy of calling those who question the authenticity of individuals as "horrifying," "nefarious,"and "obviously racist."
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